Tag: happy new year

GR Past & Present

Happy 2019! Gyroscope Review had a good year, and hopes our poets and readers did also. We put out our Third Anniversary Issue in the Spring, with a special category, ‘Planting Ourselves’, and had a another special issue, ‘The Crone Edition’, in the Fall of 2018. We also had three handmade art covers for the year, and hope to do more in the future. We continue to offer Gyroscope Review in PDF format, and as a purchasable print edition or Kindle edition for our reader’s convenience. Your support keeps us going forward.

Our submissions numbers for all 2018 editions were 2966
submissions total, including so many for the Crone Issue that it overwhelmed
our submissions system. We offer weekly poetry prompts through Twitter,
Instagram and Facebook, and love to see the results appear in our slush pile. We
are thankful for the support of all our poets and readers as we move into a new
year, and hope to keep growing and bringing you Fine Contemporary Poetry.

So onwards to 2019. Have you set goals for the upcoming
year? Submissions goals, number of poems written in a week/month/year goals?
Are you wanting to attend a workshop, hone your skills? Maybe put together a
book and get it out there, circulating? Let us know on Facebook what you have
planned for 2019.

There are all sorts of things out there to keep your poetry
production humming along. Join a critique group, it thickens your skin and
teaches perspective. Learn new forms. Work with a partner (or two or three) and
co-write poems. It’s a lot of fun, and the poems take twists and turns you
never expected. Co-writing, I learned how to do an Abecedarian, American
Sentences, Couplets, as well as writing alternating lines, stanzas, and poems
that respond to partner poems.

You political poets out there, keep writing. We need your take on things now more than ever. We don’t know where 2019 is taking us, but I suspect it will be a wild ride. Poetry grounds us, poetry motivates us. Poetry keeps us real. Go forth, create, and share with the world. Gyroscope Review is a place to get your ideas before the public. Online, print, podcast and video, let’s do what poets do best. Raise our voices and be heard.

We are now at the end of our first year of offering a print edition of Gyroscope Review and we thought, hey, let’s look at those numbers hanging out in our Submittable account. Just how many submissions did we get in 2017?

The answer: 1,854 submissions from 559 poets arrived on our virtual doorstep during the 2017 calendar year. No wonder our eyeballs need a holiday break. If we look at the percentage of what we accepted, an important bit of information for those of you considering where to send your work, our acceptance rate hovers slightly over 10%.

What about what we published during 2017? Those of you who ordered a copy of Wrap This Up: The 2017 Issuesmay already know the answer. We published 196 poems from 116 poets, 61 of whom were women. Poets published in our pages came mostly from the United States, but also represented Australia, Canada, Germany, Indonesia, Nigeria, Sweden, Turkey, and the UK. One more fun little fact: our youngest published poet, as far as we know, was an 18-year-old high school senior. We have no idea who our oldest poet was; we thought it might be a tad rude to ask. We don’t collect personal statistics when poets send us work, so these results are gleaned from bios and mailing addresses in our submissions system.

What’s on tap for 2018? We are still working that out. Here’s what we do know: we will continue to offer the best possible work in digital and print formats. We will add a new staff member in January. We will encourage the sharing of poetry far and wide as a reflection of and refuge from this world of ours. And we will keep the dialogue going with everyone who works with us to keep our poetry community strong and welcoming.

Our next issue will be available January 15, 2018. Submissions for the Spring 2018 issue will also open the same day. As always, please review our guidelines before submitting.